We’re now ready to lay out the final piece of the culture of innovation puzzle by focusing on reinforcing innovative ways of working in key underlying systems and structures. The core idea is simple. Make sure that anything that heavily influences how time and money are spent supports the ways of working that characterize your tomorrow culture.

This is a step that, sadly, is easy to skip. Remember the story of the inspirational ideas box … with a rusted lock? We call efforts like this “innoganda” that creates a burst of energy but only fuels long-term cynicism.

Habit change that sticks and scales requires an infrastructure that supports and reinforces day-to-day behavior change. Consider, by analogy, how programs like Weight Watchers successfully lead participants to change their eating habits. It isn’t a single thing, it is a combination of physical meetings, coaches and guides, suggested habit changes and metrics to reinforce the changes.

At a simple level, make sure that you always ask the question: if we do this what else do we need to do to reinforce it? For example, if you want more ideas, make sure you have a way to process them. If you want great answers, make sure you ask great questions. If you want people to experiment, build them a lab, and so on.

The more complex answer draws on a 2012 e-book that Dave Duncan and I wrote called Building a Growth Factory. A core idea in that organizations must regularly allocate finite resources such as money, assets, rewards, and leadership time. Over time the systems to allocate these resources get fine-tuned to optimize what exists rather than to create what doesn’t. If you want to do something different, one of our clients reminds us, you have to do something different. That e-book detailed 16 specific components of a fully functioning growth factory (including several related to culture). We won’t detail all of them here, but would point to four key areas to look at:

Budgeting. If you say innovation is important, but you don’t spend any money on it, how important is it really?

Staffing. If you say innovation is important, but you don’t have anyone spending any time on it, how important is it really?

Assets. Every organization has some assets that are finite, such as IT support, legal services, manufacturing capacity, and even meeting rooms. If scarce assets always go to core operations, what message does that send?

Rewards and recognition. If you tell people to be adept in ambiguity but punish them when a well-designed experiment fails, what message are you sending to them?

There’s obviously a lot packed into this idea. So let’s bring back Paul to hear how this worked at DBS.

Scott: Paul, early on in DBS’s cultural transformation you had control of real estate. How does that connect to what we’ve talked about in this IdeaLab?

Paul: Until I took on the real estate portfolio I had completely under-estimated the power of space in driving change. If you think about it, your behavior is heavily influenced by the space around you. For example, you behave differently in a library than in a supermarket. So, we started to use design of space as a powerful tool to address one of our most prevalent blockers – lack of cross-team collaboration. Our office design had been based on a long-standing belief that people like to have their own desk as it gives them a sense of belonging. Our hypothesis was that to create a sense of belonging you need to feel part of a community, not attached to a piece of furniture and that a real community would lend itself to more collaboration. So, working with the teams and the real estate department we designed a new kind of work environment. We set success goals around personal effectiveness and cross-team collaboration. The resulting space became known as Joy Space as a nod to our vision of Making Banking Joyful and is an open plan with no fixed seating, and zones based on type of work, ranging from “The Library” to “The Pub”. The new space is hugely popular. Our team members started to invite colleagues and even their families to tour their new space. Most importantly, we saw better collaboration across the teams. Other departments have now requested Joy Space design and we are gradually rolling the concept out across the company.

Scott: Has DBS done anything with its KPIs to reinforce its tomorrow culture?

Paul: We set the direction of the company through a balanced scorecard. Historically this was split over 2 sections – traditional output measure across financials, customer and employee engagement and a series of the most important initiatives for the given year. Some years ago, we introduced a third section where we set transformative goals aligned to our 26,000-person startup aspiration. One year we targeted running 150 customer journey projects, another year we introduced targets around capturing tangible economic value from our digital transformation. More recently the focus was on becoming a data-driven company. This then gets cascaded through the company and gets taken very seriously.

Scott: What about other systems and structures? I know there are a lot of them, but which are the most critical ones?

Paul: We have found that it is important to send ‘signals’ across the company by changing processes and policies. For instance, when we opened our new Technology and Innovation centre in Hyderabad we defined our dress code policy as “you can wear anything you want as long as it would not embarrass your parents.” The underlying message was “we have guardrails, but you decide.” When we realized most corporate purchases were for small amounts, we removed the need to get expenses pre-approved. Very prescriptive rules were blocking empowerment, so we have changed them. More fundamentally, about a year ago we changed our organizational structure and operating model into a platform construct that fuses together our business and technology teams. Each platform is run by “two in a box” – one lead from technology and one from business who share KPIs.

Scott: One of the other examples I’ve heard you share that sounds particularly intriguing is the “Gandalf Scholarship.” Can you say a bit more about that?

Paul: As mentioned in a https://idealab.hbr.org/groups/building-a-culture-of-innovation/forum/topic/7-lets-get-real-dbs-gets-granular-about-behaviors-and-blockers/, one dimension of our culture is our desire to be a learning company that enables our employees to acquire and develop the new skills required to thrive in a digital world. The GANDALF scholarship program has been particularly popular way to help us achieve that aspiration. It is named after our aspiration to be the D (for DBS) in GANDALF (Google, Amazon, Netflix, Apple, LinkedIn and Facebook). The way it works is applicants are given up to USD 750 to spend on any form of learning. They can buy books, attend a course or a conference or go on a site trip. They choose to learn any topic even those unrelated to work. The only condition is that each applicant must teach the subject back to colleagues at work. We were astonished at how many people signed up for the program. We have unlocked a hidden passion for teaching and a desire for being seen as an expert amongst peers.

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Have you seen anything like the things that Paul discusses? What systems and structures have you seen spur innovation?